


Fugiet a te Omnis Obscuritas

by Destinyllama



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Body Horror, Eye Trauma, Gender Dysphoria, MAG 158 spoilers, Period Typical Bigotry, Period-Typical Sexism, Self-Harm, Suicide, Trans Male Character, Trans!Jonah Magnus, eyes in places they should not be (its a TMA fic), jonah being weirdly horny about men's legs?????
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-24
Updated: 2020-04-24
Packaged: 2021-03-01 21:00:53
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,360
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23813440
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Destinyllama/pseuds/Destinyllama
Summary: Statement of Jonah Magnus, regarding his upbringing, his brother's suicide, and first encounters with the Eye. Statement given directly from subject.
Comments: 10
Kudos: 85





	Fugiet a te Omnis Obscuritas

**Author's Note:**

> Content Warnings:  
> MAG 158 spoilers  
> Graphic depictions of violence, including self-mutilation, eye trauma, suicide, and body horror  
> Eyes in places they should not be  
> Period typical gender roles and sexism  
> Self harm, specifically improper binding  
> Extreme gender dysphoria  
> Jonah doesn't use very affirming language to refer to himself (I am sorry)
> 
> I really enjoy the headcanon I've been seeing spreading around the fandom that Jonah Magnus was a transman. Not only do I find that affirming (I myself am a transman), but I'm eager to explore the psychology of a trans character willing to do horribly ruthless things. 
> 
> The title is taken from a line in the Emerald Tablet, a hermetic work talking about the creation of the philosopher's stone. It basically translates to "all obscurity shall fly from you". 
> 
> Anyway, enjoy.

Do you know what power tastes like?

I don't mean the fleeting tinge of superiority one feels when they've gotten the best of others. I mean real, _genuine_ agency, the kind of free will this world of gods and monsters so infrequently provides.

I remember the first time I felt free. I couldn't have been more than 5 or 6 at the time. I had stolen one of my father's coats, I couldn't have been more than 5 or 6 at the time, and as I looked into the forgotten antique mirror in the corner of one of my home's storage rooms I saw him. I saw myself. In that chubby face, barely starting to lose its toddler fat, its body swaddled in sleeves that dipped down to the floor, was the briefest hint of masculinity. There I was. The first time I really recognized myself in the mirror. My truest self, plucked from where it was hidden, outer presentation peeled away like old paint to reveal what was underneath. I was seen. By what... 

At the time, I couldn't say. But we both know what it was.

I should clarify why I had such a powerful experience wearing my father's coat. I wasn't always... Like this. Physically, I mean. Years of stealing others' faces has obscured it, yes, but I'm sure even you can detect the subtle hints of delicacy at the edges. The sing-song pitch, the swaying walk, the softness of intonation at the end of my sentences. Once a scarlet mark upon me... Now, it seems so much more like a badge of honor. I fought hard for what little I have.

What are they calling it nowadays...? Assigned female at birth? I knew it as an overwhelming sense of wrongness. Not the disturbing uncanniness of the Stranger, no, this was different. It was as though my whole self were obscured by ringlets and embroidery, chemise gowns and quiet gossip, and submission and submission and submission.

And I hated it. I _despised_ it. Even now, 200 years later, I feel venomous bile rising in my chest when I think about the quiet little thing, seething in "her" chair, hands clasped so innocuously on her lap, listening to some insipid suitor drone on about nothing of note. I would have loved nothing more than to spit in his face, all of their faces, told them how _stupid_ and boorish and, above all, how supremely _boring_ they were. And how _dare_ they treat me as though I were dimwitted and petite. But I had to hold my tongue. Clothe myself in a vacuous smile that meant nothing at all, while my mind wandered, usually to whatever the dullard was wearing.

Men's fashion at the time was so delightfully _tight_. The fitted breeches of the day, which curved to buckle under the knees, left so very little to the imagination. Pure white stockings hugged the calves just so, made one's legs look long and smooth. How I craved to peel the white cloth away and press my face to that supple flesh.

At first I thought it was simply desire, the impure thoughts of a young girl on the cusp of womanhood. I have always been and still am very attracted to men. But that wasn't quite it. It was more than my sexual proclivities. I wanted... To wear those stockings. To both _be_ those men and make love to them. No, I didn't want to _be_ , I _was_ a man, hidden under layers of oppressive, suffocating lace.

At this realization, I found myself in a sort of dysphoric mania. At once, the world became full of eyes, and I was a slave to the gaze of others. Everywhere, every waking moment was filled with them. Those dark, pointed pupils, tiny pinpricks of focus, staring at me, seeing me not as what I was, but what society had deemed I should be. But those disapproving glances, those offhand whispers that they thought I wouldn't notice, they _knew_. I could tell that they knew. My secret was obvious.

Was it some kind of game? Were they lording it over me to keep me under control? 

Perception became my obsession. During the day I cloaked myself in progressively thicker coatings of ribbon and pastels, while during the night I tried desperately to reveal the man underneath.

I would tear long strips of cloth from my bed sheets and hoard them until I had a neat pile of wrappings. Then I would wind them around and around myself, until every hint of femininity was purged from my frame. I would don stolen clothes, the stockings, the breeches, the cravat that I had spent so many hours starching the night before piled high around my neck. My hair, which was still long at that time, would be pulled back into a neat men's ponytail. Finally, I would recognize myself in the mirror.

I would stare at myself for hours, memorizing everything down to the smallest detail, just so that I could conjure the image in perfect, unblemished clarity. I reveled in the sight of myself, for once actually feeling connected to my own body. And at the end, I would pry it all off and admire the bruises those wrappings made on those monstrous reminders of my womanhood...

You know, I nearly sliced them off. After multiple sleepless nights, fueled by paranoia and self-hatred, I grabbed a carving knife from the kitchen and stood holding it, naked, in front of my mirror. A flurry of delusions blew through my mind, one after the other, in all their violence and horror. I envisioned I was mutilating myself. First, I would cleave from my chest those twin peaks of alien flesh, and then I would cut a long, clean line down my body, from clavicle to pubis, and reveal the truth underneath. A vivid image flooded my mind, and it was as though I were watching myself doing it, though through an observer's eyes. The blade cut straight along my sternum. A trembling hand slipped into the cut. I could feel the oily slickness of my own fat squished under my fingers as I _pulled_ the flesh back.

In between my ribs I could see them. Hundreds, thousands of eyes, just like my own, caged within my chest, staring at me. My skin, my flesh, hanging limply, contained irises of every size and color, a morbid bouquet. From this observer's perspective, I could see my own expression, one of true, abject terror.

At once, I convulsed, blood and bile spewing from my mouth. The knife slipped out of my hand and clattered across the floor as I fell. I seized, body contorting at jagged and torturous angles. From my broken abdomen screamed the unmistakable crack of bone. My ribs were pushed open from within, tearing through cartilage and connective tissue, jutting out like spears. Out of the cavity climbed a figure, cloaked in the panacea of afterbirth, hidden from me for a moment, just a moment, until he opened those same green eyes.

It was me. The man I saw in the mirror.

The feeling of prying eyes tore me out of my delusion. I whipped around in shock, afraid that perhaps someone had entered my room and now knew my terrible secret. But it was empty. Why did I feel like I was being watched if no one was there?

Then, I locked eyes with it.

Some years before my birth, my grandfather had commissioned an artist to paint a portrait of Hermes, in the austere Neoclassical style of the day. The colors on it were drab, almost boring, save for a splash of brilliant color on the god's staff. He was holding a Caduceus, of course, the symbol of medicine, of knowledge. His eyes gazed upward to those winding twin snakes. Yet, the serpents, notably, were looking... At the viewer. My father had decided to place this painting in his daughter's bedroom, in the hopes that she would grow into a wise and intelligent woman. He was right that the painting propelled my thirst for knowledge... But certainly not in the way he had intended.

You see, Hermes symbolized more than the pursuit of medicine. He was a god of boundaries, of crossroads, the messenger between the physical and the world of the unseen. He was then also, the god of secrets, closely tied to Hecate, to Thoth. Magic, sorcery, the pursuit of that hidden knowledge. There's a reason he featured so heavily in occult literature.

The connection between the physical and the metaphorical. As above, so below. As within, so without.

I wanted those secrets revealed to me. I wanted my secret self to be revealed. To manifest what was within on what was without.

I felt those twin serpents staring back at me. The thin highlights of white paint made their scales look like eyes, a hundred white pupils observing. And then... I knew it saw me. God. Not the Christian god I had been raised to worship. No, no, this was more, far more than any deity humanity could dream up. Something unspeakably ancient, undeniably so, almost indistinguishable from a force of nature, yet so personal, so intimate, that I could feel it looking into my very soul. It knew the totality of what I was, the truth underneath. The covering of skin and flesh was stripped away, I was flayed, laid bare, completely and totally naked before God.

Sweating, half mad with religious fervor, I prostrated myself before it, sacrificed all that I was, all that I would ever be on its altar. I offered it my eternal soul, my being, my life, my _wholeness_ if it could just give me what I _desperately_ wanted.

And it _answered_ my prayers.

My brother, my elder by a few years, whose name you will no doubt recognize, committed suicide. It was a shameful thing, and something my family desperately wanted to cover up, especially given the brutality of its execution.

I was fond of my elder brother, whose deep red hair and intelligent green eyes matched my own. I was sure that were I born a man, I would look nearly identical to him. We would spend hours together, conversing about the world, politics, science, art, philosophy. He was one of the few people who genuinely valued my intellect.  Still, towards the end, our relationship deteriorated. He gradually started staring at me in the oddest way during our conversations. Could he tell what I was? I suspected it. Perhaps it was my growing bitterness. More than once I had snapped at him in a jealous rage, angered at the cosmic unfairness of my lot in life. He was, after all, free to do as he pleased, while I was concealed and pampered, something locked away in a china cabinet. But I soon discovered that wasn't the source of the distance between us.

Once, while sitting with me on the bank of the creek near my family's country estate, he looked off into the distance. I could see a thin film of sweat forming on his brow, and his eyes shook with a disturbing intensity of focus. He said... That he knew I had been watching him. That he could feel my eyes on him at all hours of the day and even into the night. Sometimes it even felt... Like I was within him somehow. At times there was a pressure at the back of his eyeballs, the throbbing beginnings of a migraine that never came. It would start gently, then increase, until my brother was certain something was pushing the orbs out of their sockets. Then he looked at me with such terror, the likes of which I had never seen before, and told me he knew it was my fingers. My long, spindly fingers were reaching into his ocular cavity and plucking his eyes out of his skull.

I was instantly distressed. Hysterically, I asked him what on earth he meant, but he didn't answer. He simply looked away, back towards the distance.

Jonah Magnus was found some days later, dead in his room, his eyes violently gouged out with a letter opener.

It was deceptively easy to take his place. I took everything from him: his name, his possessions, his inheritance. The first in a long line of stolen faces. My family had no choice but to accept it. After all, they would much rather have a live son than a delusional daughter.

Does it disturb me that I so effortlessly slipped into his identity? That his death seemed to matter so little to me that I would willingly defile his memory? That I would doom the knowledge of his suicide to obscurity, perhaps even denying him what little peace he had in death by taking everything that was rightfully his? 

It did, at first. After the adrenaline wore off, after that first thrill of taking another man's place passed, I thought I was horribly monstrous. Perhaps what I had prayed to was a demon, and it had changed me into something wicked and grotesque. Of course, like so many do, I tried to justify it to myself. My brother hadn't deserved what he was born with; he didn't suffer as I had. And I would be so much more prolific with his resources.

The lies we tell ourselves, to avoid the awful truth. All in the pursuit of our own fleeting comfort.

I _had_ done something monstrous. I _was_ a monster. And it was a strange and wonderful thing. The power, the agency of it--tearing a man apart from the inside, taking all that he was and making it _yours_. I had been feeding off his paranoia for months, ignoring the inclination in myself, pretending I didn't know _exactly_ what I was doing to him, when I should have been _reveling_ in it.

I embraced the truth of my own morality and submitted myself to the piercing gaze of the Eye, under which none is hidden. And it was... Everything. It _transformed_ me, granted me all I ever yearned for.

I was _revealed_.

And that was _freedom_.


End file.
